Waiting for the president: inter-branch relations under Bolsonaro’s administration

Since the election of the far-right and
populist president Bolsonaro, the resilience of Brazilian democracy and its
system of checks and balances has been put into question. With the beginning of
the Legislative year, the institutional game has started anew. On February 1st,
the new lawmakers took their seats and elected their Speakers, showing the faces
of both the allies and opponents of the minority president.

This most fragmented Congress, populated
by a large number of newcomers, showed the extent of the 2018 tsunami of concurrent
elections at the federal and state levels. The quite stable partisan balance of
the Congress of recent years was severely shaken. Small far-right and social conservative parties grabbed
more seats while centrist and pivotal parties, for the first time since
re-democratization, dried up. Although less devasted by this tsunami, given
their electoral performance in the polarized presidential election, the leftist
parties and potential opposition did not leave this dispute unharmed. The
dominance of the Workers’ Party (PT) on the left is now challenged by the
strengthened Democratic Labor Party (PDT), in the wake of the third-place of
its presidential candidate. Can the lawmakers in both Chambers fine-tune the
checks and balances mechanisms to operate in this adverse environment?

In the Brazilian Congress, leadership
positions and parliamentary resources are allocated according to the proportional
seat share of the parties. Therefore, these changes in the partisan composition
of the chambers has raised concerns about the inter-branch relations under
Bolsonaro’s presidential term. This is, especially, because the multidimensionality
of the policy space has increased and the decision costs raised. For those
concerned about the president’s capacity to approve costly economic reforms, such
as the pension and tax reforms, a central question has been how responsive
these fragmented chambers will be to these reforming agendas, some of them
requiring supermajorities to approve constitutional amendments. On the other
hand, those worried about policy shifts affecting the minority rights and
progressive agendas implemented since the re-democratization have been asking
how intensely can the congress move toward social conservatism and illiberalism,
supported by these strengthened far-right parties?

Regardless of the substantive content of
these agendas, Brazilian presidents have been successful in approving their
agendas and changing the status quo only when they are able to make the largest
parties their bedfellow allies, and jointly cartelize the legislative agenda, thereby
boosting a friendlier inter-branch relationship. It is not only a strategy for
overcoming minority status, but also a way to make the much-vaunted, wide
presidential powers effective. Presidential unilateralism, by minority presidents
in Brazil, has been showing itself to be a dangerous route toward decisional
paralysis or, more seriously, impeachment.

Bolsonaro did not form a governing
coalition by allocating portfolio positions to legislative parties, as all
previous presidents have done. He started the administration as a minority
president, whose party (Social Liberal Party – PSL) holds 11% and 4% of the
seats in the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate, respectively. Keeping this
rhetoric against the political establishment, the president has insisted on governing
through legislative coalitions, backed by decentralized parliamentary groups. Heading
a cabinet formed by military personnel, nonpartisan experts and radical
conservatives, Bolsonaro has challenged the status quo in several policy areas.
However, a lack of presidential leadership has been remarkable since Day One of
the administration. Feeble cabinet coordination has spilled over to
inter-branch relations, as demonstrated by the first signals coming from the
Congress.

The start of the Legislative year in
February, a month after the president’s inauguration, gave lawmakers enough time
to decode the coordination problems affecting the administration. The value of
legislative arena for established parties has increased with the
anti-coalitional strategy of Bolsonaro. Its strategic advantages have increased
with the intense troubles faced by the administration in its beginning. Conflicts
among cabinet members, scandal involving the president’s son, and delays in
publicizing the legislative agenda of the government have impelled some parties
to step back their moves toward the government.

The election of the Chambers’ speakers showed
some capacity of party leaders to strengthen the legislative position in the
institutional game. The well-established
center-right Democrats party, which has some affiliated ministers but which declares
itself as independent in relation to the government, elected both speakers. In
the Chamber of Deputies, this party formed a large legislative coalition and
reelected its former Speaker. The presidential party, PSL, took part in the
coalition in the Chamber, securing important institutional positions. However,
the party’s and the government’s moves to grab more power were constrained by
the winner Speaker. Alongside this dispute, three parliamentary blocks have
emerged: the largest right-center bloc, controlling the Speakership and 59% of the
seats; and, two center-left and opposition blocks, one corresponding to 21% of the
seats, and other controlling 19% of the seats. In the Senate, intra- and
inter-party conflicts in the nomination process of candidates escalated the
contest, and the election procedures were challenged in the Supreme Court. A
newcomer senator, supported by the government’s Chief of Staff, won the
election after this disruptive dispute. Differently from the Chamber, this
process did not foster the parliamentary alignment of the parties in blocks.

In addition to these legislative parties’
moves, an unexpected event further weakened the fragility of the governing
legislative basis in the Congress. Denouncements of electoral fraud put a
minister close to Bolsonaro, who was the key coordinator of his campaign and
the president of his party, at the center of a new scandal. This minister was
the first fired after 58 days of this administration, following the release of
audio files between the president and this minister and personal accusations.
The main takeaways of this episode, from the legislators’ point of view, were:
first, the strong influence of Bolsonaro’s sons can prevail upon political and
partisan commitments; second, the aggressive posture of Bolsonaro toward his
close aide, including the use of social media, reinforced the need to ground
the relation with the president and his administration in an institutional
basis. Hence, this episode has cost reputational losses to the president and
overshadowed the introduction of his major legislative bill proposal, that of pension
reform.

This long-awaited pension reform will be
the first legislative battle for the Bolsonaro administration. As a
constitutional amendment, it requires the support of 3/5 of deputies and
senators in two-floor voting, in each Chamber, to be approved. While the state’s
fiscal situation has put pressure on the Congress to approve this reform, its
redistributive impacts have mobilized attentive interest groups and social
movements, making it a costly decision. All presidents since Cardoso
(1994-1999) have approved more modest reforms after intense conflicts in the
Congress.

Now, lawmakers might see this reform as more
costly, since they were not rewarded with a regular flow of executive resources
as members of the presidential cabinet. Anticipating risks of tit-for-tat moves
and in the opposite direction of the president’s electoral promises, government
leaders signaled the traditional “horse-trading” with individual lawmakers for
getting legislative approval of this bill. However, the political nominations
of lawmakers’ allies to positions of executive agencies is apparently paralyzed
due the failure of the government to coordinate it. From the lawmaker’s side, a clear message has
been already sent: the Deputies approved a legislative resolution revoking an
administrative decree of the executive that increased the number of officials
authorized to classify documents as secret, reducing the transparency of the
federal Executive. The lawmakers’ impatience is clear: a super majority, 71% of
the deputies, approved an urgency petition to revoke this decree. It was the first legislative defeat of the government
after the pension reform started its journey in the Congress. At this moment,
it does not show a policy conflict but, rather, an unambiguous signal that the
lawmakers are already at the bargaining table.
Waiting for the president.